Alternate Title

SYRP 2003

Summary

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the only national survey that gathers data directly from youth in the juvenile justice system. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) designed the survey in 2000 and 2001 to survey offender youth between the ages of 10 and 20. SYRP asks the youth about their backgrounds, offense histories and problems; the facility environment; experiences in the facility; experiences with alcohol and drugs; experiences of victimization in placement; medical needs and services received; and their expectations for the future. SYRP research provides answers to a number of questions about the characteristics and experiences of youth in custody including:

Who are the youth in placement?

What are their offenses?

What are their family backgrounds?

What are their expectations for the future?

How are youth grouped in living units and programs?

What activities are available in each facility?

How accessible are social, emotional, and legal supports?

What is the quality of the youth-staff relationships?

How clear are the facility's rules?

How clear is the facility's commitment to justice and due process?

What methods of control and discipline do staff use?

SYRP's findings are based on anonymous interviews with a nationally representative sample of youth in custody during the spring of 2003 using audio computer-assisted self-interview (ACASI) technology. SYRP is the latest addition to two ongoing data collections that OJJDP designed and implemented in the 1990s. It joins the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census to provide updated statistics on youth in custody in the juvenile justice system.

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

state

Restrictions

Access to these data is restricted. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a Restricted Data Use Agreement, specify the reasons for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research.

Time Period(s)

2003 (Spring)

Date of Collection

2003-03-01 -- 2003-06-15

Data Collection Notes

Individual youth answered the ACASI survey. Their facility administrators provided information about their facility by updating information from the latest CJRP and JRFC. Administrators also provided individual youth information for all sampled youth on Section II of the CJRP form.

SYRP is a component of the OJJDP's constellation of surveys that provide statistics on youth in custody in the juvenile justice system. It joins the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP),
and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census (JRFC), which are biennial mail surveys of residential facility administrators conducted in alternating years. SYRP is a unique addition to these surveys in that it gathers information directly from youth in custody through anonymous interviews. Although SYRP covers the same universe of facilities as the two census surveys, it does so through a sample methodology. Thus, based on interviews with a large, nationally representative sample of offender youth in residential placement, SYRP can generate reliable estimates about the characteristics of the full population of youth in custody.

Study Purpose

To fill the need for critical data concerning the youth who are remanded to residential
placement in the juvenile justice system, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
(OJJDP) has engaged in an ongoing program to develop a comprehensive array of complementary and
interlocking national surveys. The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the third
addition to this constellation of surveys, which also includes the Census of Juveniles in Residential
Placement (CJRP) and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census (JRFC). Together, the three surveys on
youth in custody collect and disseminate information that will assist OJJDP, other juvenile justice
policymakers, and juvenile justice program administrators in their mission to provide appropriate, safe,
and accountability-based programming for youth in custody. Unlike the CJRP and JRFC, which gather
information from the facility administrators, the SYRP obtains information from the youth themselves
through self-administered interviews. These interviews provide information that is not currently
obtainable in any other way concerning the characteristics and backgrounds of the youth, their offense
histories, their service needs and the services they received while in custody, their safety and security in
the residential setting, and their expectations for the future.

Study Design

SYRP uses an audio computer-assisted self-interview (ACASI) system to ask questions and record answers. With this system, youth wear headphones and hear a prerecorded interviewer's voice read the words on the screen. Youth indicate their response choice by touching it on the screen. The computer program automatically navigates to the next appropriate question based on the youth's earlier answers, storing all the data anonymously and securely. The method avoids literacy problems, encourages candid answers on sensitive topics, and permits strong privacy and confidentiality. Survey responses are never associated with youth's identities and delinked from facility identifiers before data are unencrypted for analysis. This meant that SYRP could ask youth about their experiences of violence and abuse without having sufficient information to provide actionable reports to child protection authorities.

Sample

SYRP used a stratified, two-stage, probability-proportional-to-size (PPS) sample design. Facilities were sampled at the first stage using a function of the facility offender count as the size measure. Clusters of youth were sampled from each selected facility at the second stage. Both pre- and post-adjudication youth and facilities are part of SYRP. The sample included 290 facilities selected from a total of 3,893 facilities on the census listings in August 2001 and/or September 2002.

Time Method

Cross-sectional

Universe

Offender youth between the ages of 10 and 20 in all facilities surveyed for the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP) and the Juvenile Residental Facility Census (JRFC) excluding only extremely small facilities (those with fewer than three offender youth in residence).

Unit(s) of Observation

individual

Data Type(s)

administrative records data

survey data

Mode of Data Collection

audio computer-assisted self interview (ACASI)

on-site questionnaire

Description of Variables

The survey included 12 topical sections, covering youth's demographics, the living conditions in the facility, the offenses that led to their current custody placement, their previous use of drugs or alcohol and any substance counseling they received while in custody, emotional problems and symptoms and any couseling they received for these, their needs for medical services and use of medical services while in custody, their educational status and educational services received, their understanding of the facility's rules and their experiences of the application of these rules, their security while in custody including access to contraband, their experiences of victimization both while in their current placement and previously while living in a household, their prior convictions for offenses and any prior custody or probation, and their expectations for the future.

SYRP also forged explicit links between the youth's interview answers and the information gathered in the normal cycles of the two census surveys by adapting and updating the latest CJRP and JRFC information for the SYRP sample. The SYRP public use data file includes those CJRP and JRFC data items that were used in findings reported in the SYRP bulletins and reports.

Response Rates

Facility: Of the 290 facilities selected for the SYRP, a total of 240 facilities were in-scope and 85 percent of these participated in the survey.

Youth: A total of 7,073 youth completed the survey out of the total 9,495 eligible youth who were sampled,
yielding a youth-level response rate of 74.5 percent.

Original Release Date

2013-03-15

Version Date

2013-03-15

Version History

2013-03-15 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Weight

Survey weights must be used in any analyses of the SYRP data to compute valid totals and proportions. Youth were included in the final SYRP sample through the random sampling of facilities and of youth within them, but youth were not all sampled with the same probability. The weights reflect the sampling probabilities of the facility and the youth respondents and adjust for nonresponse. In this way, the survey of 7,073 provided accurate estimates of the size and characteristics of the national youth offender population in custody (estimated as more than 100,000 youth).

Users of these data are strongly encouraged to read through the accompanying data documentation for further discussion of methods by which to obtain weighted statistics and for guidance with the use of the methods for proper analysis of the data.

Notes

The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

One or more files in this data collection have special restrictions. Restricted data files are not available for direct download from the website; click on the Restricted Data button to learn more.